Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
book / uses
“Then during the pandemic, I started reading the Waverley novels, and it’s all there: all the fundamental dilemmas that were raised, not just by the Glorious Revolution, but prior to that by the Civil War of the 17th century, and that were raised again in the 1745 Jacobite rising.”
book / uses
“I read Taylor as a schoolboy, beginning with the Illustrated History of the First World War, which is a potboiler, really, but it’s just full of fantastic writing.”
book / uses
“Then, when we read Democracy in America, it became even clearer what Tocqueville’s project was, which was to show why France had failed to be or could not be the United States, and why American liberty had a very distinctive set of institutional supports.”
book / likes
“It’s that juxtaposition of breaking down California in which people are online half the time and great flotillas of illegal migrants that I love about Snow Crash.”
Claim ledger
21 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“Then, when we read Democracy in America, it became even clearer what Tocqueville’s project was, which was to show why France had failed to be or could not be the United States, and why American liberty had a very distinctive set of institutional supports.”
02 / recommendation
“I read Taylor as a schoolboy, beginning with the Illustrated History of the First World War, which is a potboiler, really, but it’s just full of fantastic writing.”
03 / recommendation
“It’s that juxtaposition of breaking down California in which people are online half the time and great flotillas of illegal migrants that I love about Snow Crash.”
04 / belief
“I want to write the Kissinger book because I think there’s a lot to be learned from the 1970s, and I’ve gathered some amazing material that nobody’s looked at before because most books about the 1970s just use American sources or a few foreign sources, but I’ve been looking at the Central Committee transcripts, and they’re great.”
05 / belief
“I learned that the populism of the left might get rewarded much more than the populism of the right in Latin America because, despite pretty bad excess mortality, Mexico’s going to recover quite rapidly on the coattails of the United States.”
06 / belief
“When Meinecke sought to break free of that — and I think Meinecke is, in many ways, one of the most important and profound historical thinkers — it’s probably not that commercially successful.”
07 / belief
“I think we, in the English-speaking world, imported an idea of bureaucracy from the Germans in the same way that we imported the PhD and all the bad things about academic life from the Germans.”
08 / belief
“I went to see my daughter, whom I hadn’t seen for nearly 18 months. I learned she was fine.”
09 / belief
“I think there’s a lot of bluff there, and the media like to hype it up, but I don’t think we’ll go back to the Troubles over this issue.”
10 / belief
“I realized that I didn’t have a great affinity with royal history and steered clear of it for most of my career. It’s probably why I ended up in the United States because American readers are more interested or ready to read about bankers than British readers, who do like kings and queens.”
11 / belief
“I don’t want to write any more books after the second volume of the Kissinger biography because I think that that will be quite enough, 17, and I’m not sure that anybody really reads books anymore, at least not all the way through.”
12 / evaluation
“Then during the pandemic, I started reading the Waverley novels, and it’s all there: all the fundamental dilemmas that were raised, not just by the Glorious Revolution, but prior to that by the Civil War of the 17th century, and that were raised again in the 1745 Jacobite rising.”
13 / evaluation
“Because Collingwood brilliantly captured what it is that historians are engaged in doing and put it better than anybody I’ve read.”
14 / prediction
“I think the problem is that we are haunted by doomsday scenarios because they’re seared in our subconscious by religion, even though we think we’re very secular.”
15 / evaluation
“You read these books, I think, with a certain suspension of disbelief because the authors are signaling to you that there’s something slightly camp going on here, that it’s not to be taken too seriously.”
16 / evaluation
“That was the kind of thing that you could say in Cambridge in the early 1990s at high table to put some young upstart in his place. But Quinton’s a brilliant man, and I think he had a huge, an ultimately admirable influence on the way that Cambridge did political thought because he insisted on contextualizing the documents and insisted that we don’t read texts as if they are handed to us on stone tablets, that one has to understand Italian ideas of republicanism by delving deeply into the contexts in which someone like Machiavelli worked.”
17 / evaluation
“At the same time, I think Taylor’s method — because it strictly adhered to the diplomatic documents — led him to the very appealing conclusion that Hitler was just a traditional German statesman, and the war was a kind of accident, mainly due to misunderstandings.”
18 / evaluation
“He’s like a one-man combination of Johnson and Boswell because he’s — at one and the same time — attracted by the romance of the Jacobites and the romance of revolutionaries, too, but he’s also conscious that, really, you’re better off with the sober bourgeois existence that’s on offer in Glasgow and Edinburgh.”
19 / evaluation
“Whereas, unfortunately, a significant proportion of my countrymen in Scotland seem to believe that there could be a People’s Republic of Scotland, a terrible idea in my view.”
20 / evaluation
“He’s fantastically scathing in his review of Kissinger’s first book, a review that I only found by chance — this is A World Restored, a book that has many merits, but Taylor despised it because of its flourishes and the fact that they’re not really anchored in the documents.”
21 / evaluation
“This is a deeply unfashionable view. It has made me a hate figure for the academic left because, in the last 20 years, it has become mandatory to regard imperialism as an unmitigated evil, to dismiss economic cost-benefit arguments, to ignore counterfactual rigor, and just to engage in a massive act of condescension to the past, and this is the opposite of what Collingwood had in mind.”